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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Buildings that Lean in Pisa

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in
Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family,
and two weeks together after that in Italy. Right now, we're in
Florence.

One day we took the fast train to Pisa and
saw the Leaning Tower. Arriving at the Pisa Centrale Train Station, we
stopped at the ticket counter to ask what bus we ought to take out to
the Piazza dei Miracoli (Field of Miracles). The lady behind the
counter looked up from her book of crossword puzzles with a distracted
sort of air. “You want a what?” “A bus, please. To the Piazza dei Miracoli–“ “No buses. Not today. They’re all on strike.”She shrugged one shoulder in a half-apology, and turned back to her crossword puzzle.Bus
strikes were one of the great certainties of the time I spent in
Tuscany. Timing for maximum chaos, striking without warning, bus
drivers will stay off the road during the morning rush hour, then come
back on duty for the rest of the day, or they will knock off early, just
in time to gum up the evening commute –At least once a month
I’d come out of an evening class and discover that the bus home wasn’t
happening. If I were lucky, there’d be a paper notice taped to a post
at the school bus stop. If not, I’d stand with the other stranded
students, waiting for forty-five minutes or an hour - until it became
clear that even the erratic Florentine bus fairy (the magic schedule
fairy that pops busses out at supremely irregular intervals) had
exceeded her mandate, and then I’d walk home. In clear weather, it
was a lovely walk, particularly in the spring: an hour of soft skies
along the river, and quiet quattrocento back streets. In winter, in the
wet, with a howling storm blowing umbrellas inside out and driving you
down the sidewalk ahead of bursts of hail and sleet, it was not so
nice. Not even a little bit.A spring day like that would be
lovely for walking through a new town, but on a late-summer day with a
sky like a flat blue oven, and the world stretched thin and pegged out
flat, and quivering under the weight of a sun like a great glaring brass
disk, hot riveted to the flat center of it –Not a day for walking. We
mooched out of the train station and stood in the shade of the arcade
and looked around us for a taxi. Under the weight of that awful burning
blue sky, nothing moved. There were no taxis, no cars, no bicycles, no
people–We sighed, and slunk deeper under the awning, and a
municipal bus sailed grandly into the turning circle before the station,
and stopped only a few dozen yards from where we stood. “Strike?” The driver looked at us, puzzled. “Not today. NOT a day for strikes, a day like this.”We asked again for the Piazza dei Miracoli - “You bet.” He said. “That’s my route. Hop on, and I’ll let you know when to get off.” He grinned at us, and we saw that the bus had air-conditioning, and we decided that we loved him.The
bus ran a twisting route through the old stone city, across the river
and into a suburban Pisa where the old stone buildings had front and
back gardens, and stopped before a high stone wall, and here - here
there was movement in the world. Through a pair of tall gates we saw a
long stretch of green grass. White buildings glittered in the sun and
around them moved a twisting, churning, seething mass of humanity – none
of it Italian. And all of it carrying cameras.The Piazza dei
Miracoli is lovely– even on a burning blue summer day. Tall white walls
surround a wide green field, and buildings grow out of the grass, here
and there – a duomo, the infamous bell tower, and a high, round
baptistery. They are built of white marble, and they glare under the
sun, and all of them lean sideways.The foundations were built
shallow, and the buildings have had more than a thousand years to settle
into a soft, unstable soil. The cathedral complex was begun in the
tenth century CE, and is mostly built in the style of that time – a
style that is today known as the Romanesque. Tenth century engineers
hadn’t yet discovered the load-bearing potential of the pointed arch
(the spectacular extent of which was what allowed the towers of the
Gothic to soar so high) and they built with hefty stone walls, and
rounded arches and fat stone columns to support the walls' weight. It
is a stately style – solid, substantial, and comfortable looking.All
along one side of the precinct is a paved road set up as a very long
souvenir shop. There must be half a hundred little stands and wagons,
all of them hawking little copies of the leaning tower - as t-shirts, as
fridge magnets, as postcards, posters, kitchen aprons, hats,
paperweights, little resin paperweights, middle-size resin
paperweights, and gigantic fiberglass paperweights more than two feet
high. They are all of them irredeemably awful. Nobody sells replicas,
or even posters, of the duomo and the baptistery, which is an oversight
and a meditation on the shallowness of fame. Because the Duomo and the
Baptistry are lovely buildings, each entirely unique and special in
their own right.The Pisa Duomo is quite possibly my favorite
church. The Florence Duomo is marzipan-exquisite on the outside, but
inside is more or less like a barn. Baroque churches tend to suffer
from interior -decorator-itis, San Marco in Venice was dim and dark and
dusty (or as dusty as a church can become when it stands ankle deep in
water!) but the Duomo in Pisa is just RIGHT. The Pisan Romanesque is
vaguely Venetian, faintly Moorish, with touches of Gothic in the Arches,
Byzantine Glamour in the mosaics, Baroque in the paintings – and all of
it in entirely charming balance. Begun in 1063 and a work in progress
(like all good churches) ever since, it has grown up elegantly, and with
a certain style- gently proportioned to itself and entirely suited –
inside and out – to the site and the celestial majesty of the baptistery
next door.

The thick stone walls of the Romanesque
baptistery keep out the summer heat. Inside, we sat on a ledge and
listened to the half-hourly demonstration of the echo. The acoustics in
the Baptistry are unusual. The Baptistry is one single circular room,
almost fifty meters tall, and an accident of construction, a
double-shell roof, has turned it into a resonance chamber fit for a
choir of Catholic angels. Every half-hour the ticket guard closes and
locks the doors and walks into the very centre of the space and sings.
Three simple notes fall upward into the empty space, cascading into
complex cascades and harmonies of that were never actually sung.

We
climbed up to the high gallery and sat in the cool of the lovely
building and waited until the next performance, and heard it again.
Sometimes the gatekeeper was a whole choir and sometimes his voice
becomes an instrument – a clarinet, occasionally, and an oboe, often.
Mr Tabubil turned to me and his face was wide, full of happiness. We were filled up.

About Me

I am an Australian architect, married to a Canadian who followed me home.
In September 2011 we relocated from rural South Australia to the bustling metropolis of Santiago, Chile, where it's warmer than Canada, but less insect-y than Australia.
How's that for a compromise?